There is a growing interest among bicycle athletes, particularly professionals and serious amateurs, to gather more data about the rides. Both for the purpose of improving the athletes performance and for improving the handling and characteristics of the bicycle. Increasing numbers of sensors are used to measure a number of different parameters.
Constant focus on reducing the weight of the bicycle, leads to more fragile bicycle parts which must be maintained and supervised to keep the bicycle safe. Weight issues also lead to the provision of an internet connection in the sensor itself not being a feasible solution since a result would be that the sensor would have an excessively high consumption of electrical energy and thus require the provision of a battery being both large and heavy. This would be completely unacceptable to especially professional bicycle athletes.
It is, however, still desirable to use at least some of a plurality of sensors arranged on a bicycle to provide data that can be used to help the user perform maintenance before a safety critical situation occurs.
Many known sensors are therefore battery driven and designed for low cost and thus equipped with only short range communication such as to keep the battery weight and size as low as possible. These sensors cannot directly communicate with a remote server, as that would usually require access to the internet. Instead, a smartphone, PC, tablet, access point or other connected device may be used to bridge the data by connecting to the sensor and to the internet. A suitable application, such as Endomondo®, installed on the connected device may be used for easy access to the data on the connected device.
However, a remaining problem, especially when monitoring bicycle parts for wear to ensure timely maintenance of the bicycle, is that the user may in many circumstances not pay attention to or remember to perform a data transfer via a bridging external device in a timely manner and/or sufficiently frequently, thereby in effect making remote monitoring impossible. This will inhibit a remote monitoring scheme, which could be used to issue warnings about required maintenance or other usage instructions.